Federal election 2022: Eden-Monaro voters have their say

"After the bushfires a couple of years ago that wrecked a lot of the surrounding regions, having strong environmental policy to not only prevent that destruction but for members of the community and surrounding regions but also for the wildlife is fairly significant and probably time sensitive as well, so something that I'd like to see sooner rather than later," he says.

His town, Braidwood, on the Kings Highway between Canberra and the NSW South Coast, was surrounded by fires as the Black Summer blazes took hold. Outlying properties were burnt out and the town suffered economically when the Kings Highway was cut by fire and closed for weeks.

He rates the federal government's - and specifically Scott Morrison's - handling of the bushfire emergency as "pretty poor",

"The total debacle that was Prime Minister Morrison as he flew over to Hawaii during the worse bushfires in a century," he says.

His friend Emily Tipping, also a first-time voter, takes a more cynical view of politics in general.

"I find a lot of candidates just talk about big things and 'we're going to achieve so much' and they never actually get around to doing anything. It's all talk to get into a position. I'd love to see a candidate actually stick to their promises."

Business operator Tim Wimbourne says climate change is a big issue. His farm, upon which he built a enterprise selling native pepper, was burnt in the Black Summer fires. He's since set up shop making pasta in town.

He describes himself as centre left on the political spectrum.

"I'm always interested in politics and I'm interested in health care, education and and working conditions for working-class Australians. I've always been a union supporter and I still am. That's why I sit where I sit politically and I do see that there's a growing inequity in Australia. The only way to change that is through policy and the current government don't have any," he says.

Once dusty, weather beaten and a bit down at heel, a pit stop for Canberrans on their pilgrimage to the coast, Braidwood now wears an aura of settled, leafy affluence. It is a magnet for tree changers fleeing nearby Canberra and Sydney, especially after the confinement imposed by COVID. And that, according to art historian Anne Sanders, who has lived in the town for 19 years, creates its own tensions.

"Sydney and Canberra decamping is beginning to change the mix. Young people can't rent in town. We've got his knock-on effect of there not being enough staff to actually run the service industries here, principally cafes, restaurants, whatever else. Everyone is crying out for staff but where are they going to live?"

It's a refrain heard all over this electorate, which sits in the south-east corner of NSW, taking in the coast, the Monaro, the Snowy Mountains and a sizeable chunk of the Southern Tablelands.

Eden-Monaro is the size of Switzerland. Once the bellwether seat everyone watched as election results came in, the electorate is, according to sitting Labor MP Kristy McBain, a microcosm of the whole country.

"You've got this metropolitan, built-up centre which is effectively an extension of Canberra," she says in her electorate office in Queanbeyan.

"You've got the coastal strip, you've got the Great Dividing Range and the Snowy Mountains, you've got nearly every agricultural pursuit you can think of that happens on land or in the water in the electorate.

"Not only is the topography diverse but our communities are really diverse."

It used to be said whoever won Eden-Monaro won the country. That reputation was shrugged off when Mike Kelly won the seat for Labor in 2016. When he resigned for health reasons in 2020, the seat stayed with Labor in the byelection, won narrowly by McBain, who sits on a razor-thin 0.9 per cent margin.

While factional brawling within the NSW division of the Liberal Party has held up preselection of a candidate to square off against McBain, she still has to navigate the diverse political leanings in this almost bipolar seat.

In Cobargo, still scarred by the blaze that ripped through the town on New Year's Eve 2019 and with memories of Scott Morrison's unfortunate laying on of the hands shortly after still vivid, business operator Louise Brown is scathing in her assessment of the PM's performance.

"Scott Morrison is a dickhead. He goes and washes someone's hair and then plays the ukulele. It's vomit-making. He's a guy from marketing. He has not done one single, solitary, solid, well thought out thing. Not one. He went to the election with no platform. And he has continued all the way through. There's no empathy, there's no morality. It makes my stomach turn," she says.

She says the town was deeply divided after the infamous handshake incident with the PM. "Some people didn't like the people who didn't like Scott Morrison. It's a bit like Grace Tame not smiling," she says.

Louise lost her home during the fire and is yet to rebuild, her plight not helped by the shortage of tradies and the lack of housing fuelled by rocketing property prices and an influx of cashed-up city buyers.

"They've driven up the prices something ridiculous, which means the young ones can't afford to buy. It drives me mad. All because they want a bloody holiday house. And then they rent them out as Airbnbs."

A similar story is told down south at Eden, where much of the focus of Chamber of Commerce president Eric Wolske has lately been on the town's homelessness crisis.

"The housing shortage is absolutely critical," he says.

"That's one of the key things that needs to be looked at, not only from a local government perspective but from the state government and obviously federal. Federal needs to push down and make this happen."

He says he isn't aligned with any particular party.

"For me, it's who's going to deliver on the day that gets my vote." With the recent byelection for the NSW state seat of Bega, he says he's seen a lot of Labor people pass through town but very little attention paid by the Liberal Party.

"We get regular visits from the opposition both on a federal and a state level. We're fortunate that Kristy McBain is our federal MP. She hits the ground and gets out there and talks to people. I would be able to count on one hand how many times I've actually been asked to meet with anyone from the Liberal Party."

While he gets the sense people in Eden want to see a change of federal government, his neighbour in the shop next door, Craig Allen, senses a different mood.

"Recency bias is always an interesting thing when it comes to elections," he says.

"You've had all sorts of problems two years ago but you're voting on things that are happening right now. I think that people might perhaps be wanting the status quo. They don't want to shake things up too much. As much as people have their gripes about Scott Morrison I think it's quite likely people are going to think, 'Oh well, we've just come out of COVID, we shouldn't change our plans too much. Let's stick with what we've got.'"

At the opposite end of the electorate, at the South Eastern Livestock Exchange on the outskirts of Yass, Billy Frew and Alex Willson definitely don't want to see a change of government, even though they have reservations about Scott Morrison's leadership.

"I'm a bit of a [Peter] Dutton fan because I don't know whether Scomo's got the balls to lead," says Frew.

"I certainly think he would be a better leader than Albanese or The Greens. The Greens absolutely frighten us and our industry.

"I'm scared there's going to be some extreme land use changes if those boys get in for how we run our business now, how we use fertilisers, how we use ag chemicals, how we organise what we do. It's going to have some implications to the way rural people run their businesses."

Willson says there's been a dearth of leadership since Fraser, Hawke, Keating and Howard.

Up on the Monaro, in Cooma, a similar distrust of Labor and The Greens is evident. Community services worker Eric Ventura has a beef with the direction climate change policies are headed.

"The ones talking about climate change, they're all the elitists. They've got money. And they can talk about electric cars until the cows come home. But you talk to the normal Joe Blows here and they don't have that money," he says.

As a conservative Christian, he says he supports Scott Morrison as a fellow person of faith.

So, too, Cheryl Mudford in Queanbeyan. "Yeah, I like him. I guess he's a Christian and I'm a Christian so I like that point of view and I don't think he's too bad at all," she says.

The election issue for her, after the state of Queanbeyan's footpaths (a strictly local government problem), is health.

"The waiting lists for the pensioners, the public patients. I waited up to three years on three different issues. It's just very slow. And they lost me off the waiting list three times."

Brett Warner from nearby Bungendore says it's time for change.

"I think for too long they've been running society like an economy and I don't think that works. Again, coming back to the middle rather than far left or far right, we need to keep the economy going but not at the cost of people," he says.

"Profitability is one thing but unless it's redistributed then it only helps the minority."

Kayla Waite wants tax reform for small business.

"To reduce tax for small business owners," she says.

"I think the COVID pandemic has been a massive issue in Australia and around the world. Constant lockdowns and things like that have had a huge impact."

And how has the pandemic been managed?

"Adequately, not amazingly," she says.

And who will win?

"Not Scott Morrison. I'm not too disappointed by that."

For Kristy McBain, these diverse political sentiments present a challenge unknown in safe seats.

"I have conversations with people who are very conservative who will never vote for me but it doesn't mean you don't listen to them and understand what their issues are. Again, I have conversations with people who are very left leaning that will never vote for me. But you have to understand where they're coming from as well," the first-term MP says.

Hearing those different voices requires an extraordinary amount of travel, often on dodgy roads where the mobile signal regularly drops out.

"Since I was elected in July 2020, we're just sitting under 80,000km in the car, and that's including lockdowns. It's hard but you have to make an effort."

And from her perspective, roads and telecommunications are critical election issues, especially after the trauma of the Black Summer fires.

"For us, telecommunications and internet connectivity is always front and centre," she says.

"I can literally tell you every dip and bend in the road where I'll lose telephone connection. And when you deal with natural disasters like we have, everyone says, 'Go to the app, check the app.'

"We border Victoria and surround the ACT so you're trying to keep abreast of three different warning systems, you're trying to get information from different radio stations depending on where you are so it's crucial that we actually start prioritising communications in regional and rural communities."

She says she's not devoting much thought to the fact the Liberal Party is yet to announce a candidate. Names that have been bandied about include Erin Molan, sports broadcaster and daughter of Senator Jim Molan, and the former federal deputy chief medical officer Dr Nick Coatsworth, but both have ruled out running.

"I can only control what I can control in the electorate. There'll be a candidate at some point and then I will deal with that," McBain says.

Known as a Federation seat because it was gazetted in 1901, Eden-Monaro is located in the south-eastern corner of NSW, covering an area of 41,617 square kilometres. Extending from Yass in the north to the Victorian border, it wraps around the ACT and takes in the Snowy Mountains and the Far South Coast. Its main population centres are in Queanbeyan, Cooma and the coastal strip, which includes Bega. Merimbula and Eden. It encompasses six local government areas.

Reflecting its diversity, Eden-Monaro has been a marginal seat since the end of World War II. In 2016, it lost its claim to be a bellwether seat when Mike Kelly won the electorate for Labor, which remained in opposition.

Kristy McBain won the seat for Labor in a byelection in 2020, triggered when Mike Kelly resigned for health reasons. McBain began her political career in 2012, when she was elected to the Bega Valley Shire Council. In 2016, she was elected as mayor. During her time on Bega Valley Shire there were eight declared natural disasters, including the 2016 east coast low and associated floods, the 2018 Tathra fire, and the Black Summer fires of 2019-2020. Her public profile grew during the Black Summer fires, when she appeared regularly on TV news reports with updates on the disaster.